Community Building Strategy: 7 Cornerstones

If you want to successfully build and run a community, you need the right community building strategy. In the following article, I explain to you which points are important and should have priority in my opinion.

Elsewhere I have already described which 7 steps should be followed when building a community. Now it’s time for the 7 cornerstones of your community strategy:

• What are the goals of your community?
• What are the criteria for success?
• What is the offer for the community?
• What are the roles and segments within your community?
• How can success be measured?
• How is the community financed?
• What is the right platform?

I will now go into these points in more detail.

What are the goals of your community, with what purpose was it founded, and are these goals still relevant? This is about “shared interest”, i.e. the topics in which all community members are interested and which they pursue together. These shared interests can arise, for example, from the same origin and home or from a passion for certain topics and products.  Goals can be:

• Internal goals: Goals that serve only the members of the community, example: hardware usage support in Apple’s support community.
• External goals: Goals that serve the world outside the community, example: actively protecting the environment and placing ecological issues in the public eye through the Greenpeace community.
• Business goals: As the founder of your own community, what goals does your company pursue by building and expanding it? Such goals can be increased sales, but also customer loyalty in order to increase sales and make them crisis-proof, in short: the connection between community and commerce. 

IMPORTANT: Internal goals of the community should be consistent with the goals of your organization as initiator. This can be a clear, “literal” alignment of leadership and members, as in the example of a political organization. But it can also be a more subtle alignment if your goal is to sell your products and have your members share how they use your products and get new members excited about them. But if your business goals for the community are to increase brand awareness and sales, and members prefer to talk about the weather, you have a problem.

Your community is successful if it achieves the goals – internal, external or corporate – that it has set for itself. To achieve this, the necessary criteria for success must be in place, without which a community will not function in the long term. For a community to be successful

• members must be active and exchange information with each other and, in the case of external goals, with others; without lively dialog and joint work on the goals set, the community dies and members drop out;
• members must trust each other and the community management; without trust, existing and especially new members will not open up to the community and contribute their opinions to the discussion or disclose their personal data;
• the community must grow continuously, either inbound (interested parties seek inclusion) or outbound (the community actively approaches interested parties); neither members nor interested parties can escape the pull of a rapidly growing community;
• members must follow and actively drive the common goals of the community; for this to happen, it is important that these goals are defined and clearly communicated so that everyone is pulling in the same direction;
• the community must create real added value for members and a lasting incentive to visit it.

What added value does your community provide, what incentive does it create for members to visit it again and again? The offer can be very different, the important thing is that it is exclusive for members.

• Content: What content is made available within the community? This can be a look behind the scenes or under the hood, advance reports on new products, or content that members create themselves. When planning this content, it helps to create a content calendar that sets the most important topics on a weekly basis over the course of a year.
• Products: You can also offer products within your community that are not available anywhere else – special editions or designs created by members. 
• Events: Whether virtual or offline – your community gets to know each other better and grows together at events. They are an important building block for your members’ community experience. 
• Roles: What tasks and functions can your members take on within your community? How do they qualify for them?

In your community there will be different roles from the beginning. These can be created through affiliation, activity, interests, tasks, and point awards. Examples are: 

• Community Manager: They are employed in your organization and take care of community building (member recruitment, member evaluation and selection, onboarding of new members), selection and operation of the community platform / software, topic selection, organization of events, management of member data and membership fees, if applicable, as well as the community budget.
• Moderators: In the beginning, you will probably use your staff for this demanding task. As the community grows and volunteers are found who are not only motivated but also qualified for this role through high-quality contributions and commitment to the community, its goals and rules, you can increasingly assign this role to them.
• Super Users: they contribute more than the average member and are the most valuable to you. They are often the first adopters of new initiatives and recommend the community to their network. You should pay special attention to them to reward their engagement, understand their goals, and keep them motivated, for example, by assigning them as moderators.   
• Opinion leaders: In every forum, sooner or later people crystallize who contribute more to the dialog than others, whose contributions are rated better than the average. You should know them and motivate them by giving them special mention or awards.
• Senior members: Who has been with you the longest, perhaps even since the inception of your community? Perhaps your senior members would like to share the history and beginnings of your community in occasional retrospectives to strengthen the community’s identity.
• Followers: Your largest target group within the community, neither particularly active, nor particularly popular, nor a long time member. It is important that they also participate regularly – even if not as often – and follow the values and rules of the community.  

The more your community grows, the more useful it can be to divide it into different community segments in which larger groups of members are grouped together in order to keep a better eye on the goals and growth of the community and to be able to serve different target groups differently. Segmentations are possible…

• …by region: a region can have a lot in common and can even be the reason for communities to form; this way regional communities can form within your community;   
• …by product group: the larger and more diversified your product portfolio is, the more likely it is that subgroups will form, especially if your products and their use are the focus of your community;
• …by language: ideally you should address each sub-community in their native language; if this is beyond your resources at first, you can implement it at a later stage, when your community has grown to the point where native speakers are available as moderators.   

Build, measure, learn – without measurable goals, improvement cannot be targeted. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you can use to align your success can be:

• Membership growth
• Number of participants at events (webinars, offline events)
• Newsletter open rate
• Community traffic
• Number of posts per period n
• Social media shares
• Product recommendations
• Product purchases

Building a community costs resources – time and money. Therefore, when setting up the community strategy, this important point should be considered in the form of a business model. How is the community financed – through membership fees, product sales, paid content (in the case of media companies) or through an investment by your organization? This is accompanied by the question of whether the community has a profit motive. It makes sense to prepare an annual calculation that assigns possible costs to the KPIs of the community and thus provides you with the ability to plan the required use of resources.  

For your community to grow and thrive, it needs the right platform. For online communities, this can be social media channels or a company’s own platform. With the former, visibility is higher from the start, which can lead to faster growth. On the other hand, customer loyalty is much lower than on an exclusive, company-owned community platform. The latter gives you the opportunity to tailor it to the needs of your members and the goals of your company. If you choose this option, you should pay attention to the following functions when selecting the software:   

• Contact management: In order to keep an overview of your community members and their contact data, the platform should either have its own contact management or interfaces (APIs) to common CRM systems.
• Reward system: It should be possible to award points to members in recognition of their number of posts, recruitment of new members, product reviews, in short: their commitment to the community and its growth. These points can then be exchanged for perks or exclusive products.
• Networking: The platform should allow members to share topics and network with each other to keep the community active and growing together.
• Voting / Feedback Tools: It should be possible to conduct votes in the community and share them digitally internally or externally. In addition to such voting tools, there should also be feedback tools that can be used as a gauge of member satisfaction and show them that your organization cares about their opinion.
• Sharing: Content should be able to be commented on and shared – across all channels where members are active. User-generated content should be given a central role. It can make sense to curate this beforehand, which requires the appropriate features in the software solution used. 

It is important to find out which mechanisms – member activities, content – mutually reinforce each other and thus cause a growth of the community and its importance. These should be used specifically and repeatedly as a catalyst to achieve the goals defined at the beginning. 

In community building, creating and following an appropriate community strategy is important. It defines the goals, players, tools, resources and direction of your community. And helps you to ensure that your community is successful in the long term.